by Mark Moyar
At the end of the meeting, General Taylor decreed that all Ranger units would be deactivated. The Ranger training center, he said, would be turned into a component of the US Army’s infantry school and would train select members of the regular Army in infiltration, scouting, and raiding skills. Taylor gave a nod to Bank’s proposed Special Forces and authorized a training center for psychological warfare and special operations.
As McClure contemplated how he would set up this new training center, Lieutenant Colonel Volckmann urged him to separate special operations from psychological warfare. According to Volckmann, the conventional military looked down upon psychological warfare as a repository for untrustworthy “longhairs” who were prone to exaggerating the impact of leaflets and radio broadcasts, and Volckmann did not want this “stigma” to “rub off on Special Forces.” Furthermore, Volckmann worried that the “longhairs” would dominate the leadership of the center and drag the special operators along by the collar.
Colonel Bank brushed off Volckmann’s worries with the airy confidence of an old deckhand counseling a sailor’s apprentice. “We’ll supersede those longhairs, you watch,” Bank assured Volckmann. “They’ll have a few Psy War units there amounting to perhaps 150 men. Compared to what we hope to have, that’ll be peanuts.”
McClure decided to keep special operations within the Psychological Warfare Center. The umbrella of psychological warfare, he recognized, would reduce the visibility of special operations and hence tamp down opposition from conventional military men who distrusted special operators but merely ridiculed psychological warriors. Some observers would credit his cloaking of special operations beneath the psychological warfare umbrella with averting the elimination of the Special Forces in their infancy.
Activated in May 1952 at Fort Bragg, the Psychological Warfare Center consisted of two departments—Psychological Warfare and Special Operations. They were not to be the most harmonious of partners. Some officers in both departments doubted that the two fields had enough in common to warrant inclusion in the same center. Because of classification concerns and the desire to minimize scrutiny from the regular Army, most of the publicity given to the new center accentuated Psychological Warfare rather than Special Operations, giving rise to complaints from the Special Operations department that it was not getting its share of the limelight. Special operators also groused that the school’s student handbook was “slanted heavily toward Psychological Warfare to the detriment of Special Forces,” and that “the Special Forces student, therefore, will look upon himself as a ‘country cousin’ to the Psychological Warfare Center.”
On June 19, 1952, the US Army formed the first Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg. It was designated the 10th Special Forces Group, to make the Soviets think another nine were sneaking around somewhere, and placed under the command of Colonel Aaron Bank. The 10th Group’s stated purpose was to wage guerrilla warfare behind Soviet lines in tandem with indigenous resistance organizations. The workhorse of the Special Forces Group was the fifteen-man Operational Detachment Alpha, called ODA or A-team for short, each having a captain as commander, a first lieutenant as executive officer, and thirteen enlisted personnel. The Special Forces company consisted of ten A-teams and one B-team, the latter a headquarters element led by a major. The battalion had three companies and a C-team led by a lieutenant colonel, whose seniority would make him a more credible counterpart to senior resistance leaders.
Colonel Bank issued stringent recruiting standards in the belief that operating with indigenous guerrillas behind enemy lines “required maturity, expertise, dedication, and leadership, and only the best possessed these essential qualities.” Recruits were required to be at least twenty-one years of age, with a rank of sergeant or above and a superior personnel record. They had to be airborne trained or ready to receive airborne training, and they had to express a willingness to parachute into enemy-held territory wearing civilian garb. Preference was given to those who could speak a European language.
Bank anticipated a flood of volunteers, with heavy representation from highly desirable groups like OSS veterans, Ranger veterans, airborne troopers, and foreign-born individuals who had been accepted into the US armed forces. To his dismay, the 10th Group received only a trickle of applications. The security classification of the group’s activities made publicity so difficult that large numbers of soldiers knew nothing of the Special Forces or their recruitment drive. Commanders in airborne units and other Army units, worried by the prospect of losing their most enthusiastic and fit men, obstructed the distribution of applications for the Special Forces or made sure that completed applications got lost in the administrative paper shuffle. Career management officers, moreover, advised potential candidates that service in the Special Forces would reduce their chances for promotion.
Obtaining foreign-born personnel for the Special Forces proved especially problematic. Under the Lodge Bill, the Army had been authorized to recruit 12,500 aliens, but the number of applications received, not to mention the number of worthy applications, came nowhere near that sum. By mid-1952, only 5,272 men had applied for the Lodge Bill billets, of whom only 411 were deemed suitable for security clearances. Only 211 of those ended up enlisting in the Army. By late 1952, just 22 Lodge Bill men had signed up for Special Forces.
In the face of these difficulties, Bank concentrated on siphoning manpower from a few oases of suitable men. The noncommissioned officer corps of the Army Airborne became a top source of enlisted recruits. For officers, the 10th Group drew heavily on the Army Reserves, where officers were less concerned with attaining high rank and more open to unconventional assignments. Charles Simpson, one of the first men to join the Special Forces, observed that the early Special Forces officers included “freethinkers who had never adapted to the spit and polish of the peacetime, palace-guard, 82nd Airborne Division,” and “innovators and imaginative people who wanted to try something new and challenging, who chafed at rigid discipline, and who didn’t care what the career managers at the Pentagon said or believed.” The oases did not, however, satisfy all of the needs of the 10th Group, and in the end the group took in some men who were special only in the sense that no one else in the Army wanted them.
Bank saw to it that the training regimen of the 10th Special Forces Group resembled the Jedburgh training he had received during World War II. Trainees learned techniques of guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and espionage as well as the Fairbairn style of hand-to-hand combat that had been taught to OSS trainees. At Camp Carson in Colorado, they marched, patrolled, climbed, and made camp in the snow of Pike’s Peak and the Garden of the Gods. Language training and area studies took place at forward locations in Europe.
While Bank concentrated on preparing the Special Forces for World War III in Europe, several dozen members of the Special Forces were shipped off to the war of the here and now, arriving in Korea during the spring of 1953 for the conflict’s final months. Americans who encountered the newcomers generally came away less than impressed. Officers on the staff of the Combined Command Reconnaissance Activities Far East faulted the Special Forces personnel for their lack of training in Korean culture and skills like foreign weapons, small boats, and supply. A high percentage of the Special Forces arrivals failed a basic map-reading test.
Some individuals who witnessed the Special Forces in Korea contended that “not enough attention had been given in the initial selection of candidates, particularly in respect to temperamental, psychological, and intellectual factors.” At the UN headquarters responsible for partisan forces, staff members reported that a number of Special Forces soldiers “were too young and immature” and had shown up with mistaken hopes that they would all get to jump out of airplanes. Certain Special Forces personnel were said to be “contemptuous and hostile toward the Koreans,” and they appeared “to have had no desire toward achieving a better understanding of another culture.”
In June 1953, mass protests against the Communist authorities in East Berlin trigger
ed a decision in Washington to send the 10th Special Forces Group into Germany to support the opposition. East German and Soviet security forces crushed the uprising before the 10th Group could get near, but the event did lead to the deployment of the 10th Special Forces Group to the Bavarian town of Bad Tölz. Bank and his men took up residence in a compound that the Nazis had used to train soldiers, which they found a vast improvement over the Spartan barracks they had inhabited at Fort Bragg. Bachelor officers occupied a requisitioned hotel while married officers and men lived in requisitioned houses. Single enlisted men stayed in “private” rooms, which meant that only six men occupied each room. The compound had a soccer field, an outdoor track, a large mess hall, and a sparkling kitchen replete with modern electric appliances. Training exercises made use of the compound’s airstrip, indoor swimming pool, and finely appointed gym, and the nearby mountains and forests provided excellent grounds for the practice of guerrilla war.
Only half of the 10th Group ended up deploying to Bad Tölz, the other half remaining at Fort Bragg to become the nucleus of a new Special Forces Group, the 77th, redesignated the 7th Group a few years afterward. In 1957, the 1st Special Forces Group took shape at Japan’s Camp Drake, birthplace of Puckett’s Rangers. Opposition to special units among the regular Army prevented the Special Forces from attaining the rapid growth that McClure and Bank had envisioned. By the end of the 1950s, the three Special Forces Groups had a total of just 2,000 men.
Although the relatively modest pace of expansion left the Special Forces as Lilliputians in the land of the big green Army, it did allow the special warriors to surpass the psychological warriors in numbers. As Bank had predicted, numerical superiority enabled the Special Forces to shake the psychological warfare yoke. In 1956, the Psychological Warfare Center was renamed the Special Warfare Center and School, and at the Pentagon, the Office of the Chief of Psychological Warfare became the Office of the Chief of Special Warfare. The Army’s psychological warriors thereafter were the indisputable “country cousins.”
Other rivalries, though, would present the Special Forces with more formidable and lasting problems. Because supporting resistance movements in Europe was the raison d’être of the new Special Forces, Bank and McClure were intent on obtaining information concerning Europe’s potential resistance groups. No one in the Army possessed that information, so they turned to the one organization that did, the CIA. When pressed by McClure for information on such groups, the CIA stonewalled, claiming bureaucratic privilege like a colonial viceroy waving off meddlesome visitors from the ministry of colonies. General Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA director, notified the Army in March 1952 that his agency was not meeting McClure’s requests “because the information requested impinges directly upon secret operations in which we are currently engaged and for which, at this time, we are solely responsible.”
The Air Force, which in 1947 had been split off from the Army into a separate service, piqued McClure by attempting to elbow its way into a bigger position in “unconventional warfare,” the newest moniker for the support of armed resistance movements. Air Force officers contended that their service’s insertion of Korean operatives into North Korea for the CIA and its resupply of CIA-sponsored guerrillas showed that the Air Force occupied a seat of prominence and distinction in the court of unconventional warfare. McClure lobbied with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to compel the Air Force to transfer all aircraft currently supporting the CIA to the mission of supporting his Army special warfare branch, but to no avail.
The Air Force went so far as to form an Air Resupply and Communications Service dedicated to the conduct of unconventional warfare. Colonel Bob Fish, who was summoned to Washington in 1951 to help develop the new organization because of his World War II experience in clandestine air operations, later described the whole Air Force effort as an exercise in amateurism. “There was a small group—a clique, you could call it—in the Pentagon at the time that was trying to grab off a great big mission that didn’t really belong to the Air Force,” Fish said. “They figured, if they could swing it, it would mean promotions for them and all that kind of good stuff. They really hadn’t thought the thing through very well.”
The commander of the Air Resupply and Communications Service, Brigadier General Monro MacCloskey, attempted to make the unit permanent as the end of the Korean War approached. Foreseeing stiffer bureaucratic competition for resources, he ordered his subordinates to execute Operation Think, which consisted of brainstorming for peacetime missions for the unit to perform. The results of Operation Think failed to impress the postwar budget cutters. After the Korean armistice, the Air Resupply and Communications Service was deactivated and the Air Force’s involvement in unconventional warfare restricted to providing air transport at the request of the Army and CIA. Because of those decisions, Air Force special operations forces would be constrained in their subsequent acquisition of missions and in their organizational divergence from the rest of the Air Force, setting them on a profoundly different course from Army special operations forces.
PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN, unlike his predecessor, displayed no particular interest in special operations forces. The revival of special operations forces during the Korean War was driven solely by military leaders and guided mainly by officers’ remembrances of World War II. The scarcity of involvement from the political leadership spared the special operations forces from the meddling of the uninitiated, though it did not avert a good many other decisions that ultimately undermined the cause of special operations forces, such as the initial emphasis on Ranger units and the focusing of the Special Forces on Europe.
During the Korean War, SOF again struggled to find missions that justified the resources invested in them. The Rangers found few opportunities to operate behind enemy lines or to use their special airborne and amphibious capabilities. This problem led ultimately to the dissolution of the Rangers, which in turn opened the door to the creation of the Special Forces—whom the nation would never end up using in their original core activity of supporting resistance movements in Europe.
Geography, time, and the size of the opposing armies made it impossible for special operations forces to alter the Korean War’s strategic momentum. At times, the Rangers made outstanding tactical contributions by performing particularly difficult infantry tasks, which explains why some conventional commanders welcomed them. Those contributions, however, were largely offset by the reduction in quality of the other US ground forces resulting from Ranger absorption of superior personnel. In the case of the Korean partisans whom US special operations forces supported, resistance activities compelled the enemy to divert troops from the main battle line, which provided some tactical advantages but had only modest strategic impact.
For conventional officers who were inclined to think ill of special units, the brief and problematic history of the Rangers in Korea confirmed that special operations forces were a wasteful diversion of talent. The poor results of the deployment of Special Forces into Korea provided them further ammunition. Thanks in part to the subsuming of special warfare under psychological warfare, the Special Forces managed to work their way onto the scene without attracting much notice from the regular Army, but conventional officers consistently obstructed their efforts to recruit men away from conventional units.
By the end of the 1950s, the outlook for special operations forces appeared bleak. The Rangers were gone. Early historians of the Korean War were treating special operations forces much like the historians of World War II had—as minor sideshows. Within a war that was to acquire the nametag of “the Forgotten War,” the special operations forces were to become some of the most forgotten units. The recently minted Army Special Forces had not grown to the extent their champions had desired, and the sole war-zone deployment on their resumé, during the last months of the Korean War, had been a shambles. The special operations forces of the Navy and Air Force were even smaller and more obscure. Their existence under siege, the special operations forces enter
ed the 1960s anticipating renewed struggles to keep the conventional forces from swallowing them up, with the odds heavily favoring the sharks over the minnows.
CHAPTER 5
VIETNAM
Within the pantheon of America’s special operations forces, the bust of William J. Donovan is rivaled in prominence by only one other, that of another son of Irish immigrants, John F. Kennedy. Born in the Irish mecca of Boston one month after the United States entered World War I, Kennedy grew up in a country that looked down on Irish Americans as second-class citizens, much as it had thirty-five years earlier during Donovan’s boyhood. In terms of social status and upbringing, however, Kennedy was closer to Franklin Roosevelt than to Donovan. Born into the Irish American nobility, he was the son of Joseph Kennedy, a fabulously wealthy financier, and Rose FitzGerald Kennedy, daughter of Boston mayor John Francis FitzGerald. Attending the Choate School and Harvard, long the bastions of Anglo-Saxon Protestants, young John Kennedy used his charisma and charm not just to fit in but to gain entrance to exclusive institutions such as Harvard’s Spee Club and Hasty Pudding.
After graduation from college, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, Kennedy joined the US Navy. In August 1943, a Japanese destroyer rammed his torpedo boat in the middle of the night, breaking the boat asunder and dumping its crew into the ocean. Kennedy and most of the other sailors swam through shark-infested waters to a nearby island, where they drank coconut milk for six days until their rescue. Joseph Kennedy, as part of his life-long campaign to propel his son to high office, arranged for a Hollywood studio to turn the episode into a feature film.
In 1946, John F. Kennedy gained election to the US House of Representatives at twenty-nine years of age, and six years later he won a seat in the US Senate. An ardent anti-Communist, Kennedy chided the Eisenhower administration for shrinking America’s land armies and relying on nuclear deterrence to protect America’s overseas interests. In Kennedy’s view, the United States needed to enlarge its ground forces, including its special operations forces, so that it had the option of intervening militarily in limited conflicts, rather than having to choose only between nuclear brinksmanship and capitulation. Of special concern to Kennedy was the subversion of third-world governments by Communist insurgencies, which the Soviet Union and China were promoting in order to spread the global revolution without massive invasions that could incite US intervention, as had occurred in Korea in 1950.
